Saturday, January 13, 2007

Randomiser #13: 13 January 2007

Today's song: Mercury Rev, "Holes"I didn't even know I owned a copy of this. Apparently it was on some cover CD that came with Total Film years back. They were terribly fashionable with the music press at around this time, largely for doing songs like this - fragile epics with a curiously timeless quality to them. And then you listen to the lyrics, and wish you hadn't. "Holes / Dug by little moles..." Dear me.

To be honest, I've never quite bought into Mercury Rev. It's the sort of record where I admire the craftsmanship, but it's a little too studiously "We're going to make a lushly arranged artistic classic" for my tastes. And this is essentially a very brief little hook of tune, looped with increasingly elaborate arrangement for the whole song - something that sometimes works, but here just kind of irritates me. The wavering vocals don't help. My head says it's technically very good; my heart isn't feeling it. I just feel like they're trying too hard to write a classic album.

Also:

- The predictive text on my phone seems to be getting downright weird lately. I'm sure "lilongwe" is not a word, and certainly not one common enough that anyone's going to be finding it useful. And when it does come up with real words, they tend to be things like "perchance" and "hogarth."

- Marvel announce midnight release for Dark Tower #1, apparently because (as we so often hear) retailers demanded it. This one seems to be rather better attested than usual, mind you, so fair enough. But I find it very hard to believe that people are sufficiently excited about a comic book adaptation of a Stephen King novel to make it worthwhile. He's not even credited as working on the book, for heaven's sake. Is there really that much demand for this thing?